Hillary’s “Darkened” Ad
This is making the frontpage everywhere all day, so I’m compelled to drop in my two cents.
Youtube turns video to shit. You give it nice source material, it gives you garbage. In fact, it will happen to any video you stuff through a youtube-sized pipe.
Most flash-video sites use a very low bitrate (contrast quality there to digital cable TV, a DVD, or a high definition disc format — all which use increasing orders of magnitude more bandwidth) compression. This kind of lossy compression prioritizes the image data and throws out as much lower-priority information that is necessary to fit inside a bandwidth envelope. First to go is color information. Our eyes mostly care about ‘luminescence,’ the overall intensity of parts of the image. Any gaps or incorrect color we’re able to fill in subconsciously. So, first the depth of the color palette is reduced, and second, color resolution is squashed.
In addition, color correction of images and video across different display types is a huge amount of work, even for professionals. Production quality monitors that have accurate, standardized color and profile correction tools are very expensive. It’s difficult to even create something with a color consistent pipeline. Once it’s out the door, all bets are off. The average computer and monitor setup is shit. If you could find me ten random laptops that had anything close to consistent color, I’d convert to a faith of your choosing. Even if you have carefully color corrected your entire production workflow, and send things out with correct color profiles, youtube will eat it and turn it to shit. It doesn’t care. In fact, people who had TiVo’d the actual commercial are coming back and reporting that… yes, the actual aid aired on tv looked “right.” This is not a surprise — TV tends to have high production values, and stations have staff whose entire purpose in life is to care about things like color profiles, aspect ratios, bitrate, etc.
Second, part of the youtube magic is taking your source material and hammering it into their containers. Aspect ratios will get stretched unless you take extreme care to properly letterbox your source. I’m not surprised at all something thrown up on youtube would be stretched significantly, as the Hillary ad is.
As others have pointed out, the absurdity of the situation is painfully evident if you go to MSNBC’s own page and view their streaming version of the source material. Anyway, enough. I came up with the above answers within a few microseconds of hearing about the ‘controversy’ and seeing the ’smoking guns.’ Thanks goes out to FactCheck for putting additional background together and posting the only sane conclusion to this situation.
I’ve generally expected our party — in particular the bloggers fanning these flames — to be tech savvy enough to understand the above intuitively, natively, without any second thought. In the future, let’s try to keep things reality based before we set our tin beanies spinning.
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